Is this what Canada has become under Harper???

Leaders miss the point at D-Day anniversary: Salutin

The leaders who gathered in Normandy a week ago for D-Day’s 70th anniversary missed the point. They hailed the bravery of those who landed there and the causes they fought for. President Barack Obama called it “democracy’s beachhead” in the “struggle for freedom.” Stephen Harper said it was “the triumph of the values for which Canada stands. Freedom. Democracy. Justice.” He added a “curse” on anyone who “denies the very existence of evil,” as if he knows such people.
 

But the leaders at the time had another — more personal — perspective. I’m surmising this from their words in the 1945 preamble to the United Nations charter. (United Nations was what countries allied against Hitler et al. called themselves; it became the global organization.) It begins: “We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind . . .” This isn’t about one war for particular causes, even causes as large as freedom. It’s the coda to the experience of a generation. They signed it even before the first nuclear bombs were dropped on Japanese cities.
 

Their experience included the previously unthinkable carnage of “The Great War,” fo
ught to “end all wars.” Followed just 20 years later — think how brief that is, except when you’re only 20 yourself — by another war, which was worse! With a global depression between. You’d have needed to be a dolt not to get the point. Even world leaders, always well insulated from truths obvious to normal people, got it: this must never happen again. They were shaken. You can hear it.
 

Among them was Lester Pearson, Canada’s ambassador to the U.S., who went on to be foreign minister, then prime minister. In 1956, when a crisis in the Mideast threatened to precipitate another one, he proposed a UN peacekeeping force, to which Canada contributed. That became our signature military orientation for 50 years — until Afghanistan. Then it changed, especially in the Harper years. We went back to fighting “real” wars, against “scumbags,” i.e. evil — as if there was something embarrassing about peacekeeping. Real armies fight real wars, like the guys who hit the beach in Normandy.

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2014/06/12/leaders_miss_the_point_at_dday_anniversary_salutin.html